Cavalry was built by people who spent years making motion at Mainframe, a Manchester studio known for high-volume, systematically produced animation. That origin matters. This isn't a tool conceived by software engineers observing motion designers from a distance. It's a tool made by people who got tired of the manual, repetitive parts of their own work.
The core idea is procedural 2D animation. Instead of keyframing every property on a timeline, you connect nodes that define behaviors. A particle emitter feeds into a distribution system. A data source drives a graph. A physics simulation handles what would otherwise be twenty manually keyed bounces. Once the relationships are defined, you adjust the logic rather than re-doing the keyframes. This is how Cavalry makes animation scalable: change one node and everything downstream updates.
For data-driven work, it's hard to match. Google Sheets import (Pro tier) means you can pull live data directly into animation parameters. Brand teams use this for templated motion that generates variations automatically. Studios like Pentagram and Buck have built workflows around it for exactly this reason. Apple, Canva, and Nike are in the client list.
The practical gap is the plugin ecosystem. After Effects has twenty years of third-party tools (Trapcode, Red Giant, BorisFX) that handle effects Cavalry can't touch natively. For projects that need those effects, Cavalry works best as a production stage inside a pipeline that finishes in AE. For projects that don't need them, it's often faster to do the whole thing in Cavalry.
Character animation improved significantly in recent versions, and the physics simulation (Forge Dynamics) is genuinely useful rather than a checkbox feature. The Canva acquisition, announced in 2025, raised questions about the tool's independence, but the team has committed to keeping the free Starter tier permanent and maintaining professional depth.
Free Starter tier is real and permanent. Pro is £16/month (annual). 70% education discount exists.
Cavalry was built by people who spent years making motion at Mainframe, a Manchester studio known for high-volume, systematically produced animation. That origin matters. This isn't a tool conceived by software engineers observing motion designers from a distance. It's a tool made by people who got tired of the manual, repetitive parts of their own work.
The core idea is procedural 2D animation. Instead of keyframing every property on a timeline, you connect nodes that define behaviors. A particle emitter feeds into a distribution system. A data source drives a graph. A physics simulation handles what would otherwise be twenty manually keyed bounces. Once the relationships are defined, you adjust the logic rather than re-doing the keyframes. This is how Cavalry makes animation scalable: change one node and everything downstream updates.
For data-driven work, it's hard to match. Google Sheets import (Pro tier) means you can pull live data directly into animation parameters. Brand teams use this for templated motion that generates variations automatically. Studios like Pentagram and Buck have built workflows around it for exactly this reason. Apple, Canva, and Nike are in the client list.
The practical gap is the plugin ecosystem. After Effects has twenty years of third-party tools (Trapcode, Red Giant, BorisFX) that handle effects Cavalry can't touch natively. For projects that need those effects, Cavalry works best as a production stage inside a pipeline that finishes in AE. For projects that don't need them, it's often faster to do the whole thing in Cavalry.
Character animation improved significantly in recent versions, and the physics simulation (Forge Dynamics) is genuinely useful rather than a checkbox feature. The Canva acquisition, announced in 2025, raised questions about the tool's independence, but the team has committed to keeping the free Starter tier permanent and maintaining professional depth.
Free Starter tier is real and permanent. Pro is £16/month (annual). 70% education discount exists.